Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives? - <AUTHOR> Since Keybase is being acquired by Zoom (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430), it would be lazy to not start looking at alternatives already
I myself mostly use the following features from Keybase: Chat, KBFS, Git repositories and encrypting messages sent out-of-band via PGP in Keybase (and the various cryptographic tools [signing, validation etc])
What alternatives have the features outlined above, but are ideally either FOSS or at least not run by a for-profit company? I mainly used Keybase to make using those features easier, so please don't suggest the cli of gnupgp (or similar) as alternatives. <comment><USER2> > _I myself mostly use the following features from Keybase: Chat, KBFS, Git > repositories and encrypting messages sent out-of-band via PGP in Keybase > (and the various cryptographic tools [signing, validation etc])_

While all these features are individually nice, I kinda started to worry about Keybase as a product when they started bolting on stuff like this.

I think the key (pun intended) to stable & ongoing success in this space is to focus on doing one thing well. Keybase was incepted as a service for signing & validation. There's currently [https://keys.pub](https://keys.pub) for that. I'd be interested to hear if there's others.

For chat, there's a lot of competitors to choose from. I like Riot.im.

For KBFS, Tresorit has been mentioned. I signed up, but haven't been super impressed with their clients yet. I'm not sure what better options are out there.

<comment><USER3> None of these really worried me.

The Stellar airdrop was my "oh shit" moment.

<comment><USER4> "Going crypto" is the new 'jumping the shark'.

<comment><USER5> Then again "crypto" is what Keybase is all about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the only complete alternative is to successfully persuade the Keybase team to release their server code under an open source license. Their client is already open source.

[https://github.com/keybase](https://github.com/keybase)

The only other alternative is a mishmash of multiple apps that each do part of what Keybase does.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be really great, but feels like very unlikely as well. If they could open source it, why didn't they do it before?

<comment><USER7> Probably, because it provided them with more likely paths to monetization having everyone dependent on their server infrastructure. An argument could be made that if Zoom wants to build positive equity with the security community then open sourcing the Keybase server might be a good way to do that.

<comment><USER8> The only positive Zoom is interested in is the rate of growth in their bank account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi, I'm developing Bloom[0] which is an entirely FOSS encrypted[1] and offline-first (but with multi-devices sync!) productivity app which features Files, contacts, calendar and notes. So no chat nor Git, but everything else :)

If you are interested in joining the (coming soon) beta, feel free to contact me: [https://bloom.sh/contact](https://bloom.sh/contact)

[0] [https://gitlab.com/bloom42/bloom](https://gitlab.com/bloom42/bloom)

[1] [https://gitlab.com/bloom42/bloom/-/wikis/security](https://gitlab.com/bloom42/bloom/-/wikis/security)

<comment><USER10> am I right that it's Google apps FOSS alternatives?

<comment><USER9> Yes :) I launched it last June but it was a webApp. Time have passed and the project has switched to native apps to offer what Google (and the web) can't offer: offline first and end-to-end encryption.

So it offers the same services as Google, but with better (in my opinion) features.

<comment><USER10> can I get beta invite?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not seeing much mention in this thread of the cryptographically-linked identities feature of Keybase, i.e. where you can link your Website, Twitter, Reddit, HN, etc.

As far as I know, that was Keybase's initial offering, which they then built on top of to create a full suite of applications.

Although to play the Devil's advocate - while the feature is cool and implemented nicely, I doubt that many people actually use it beyond the novelty factor.

<comment><USER12> I've had one person use it to find me after a conference, confirm my various online identities (he only had one handle to work with), and contact me securely.

That leadededededed to paying work, so it was important even if it only happened one time.

<comment><USER13> > That lead to paying work

Typo: it should be "led", not "lead"

<comment><USER12> typo corrected, thanks!!

<comment> streb-lo : )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since nobody's mentioned Wire, it's not a 1:1 alternative but it's close in terms of chat. I don't think any 1:1 alternative to KeyBase will rise up anytime soon, hosting git and files will be a bit to build up to.

Website:

[https://wire.com/en/](https://wire.com/en/)

Their backend is open source unlike KeyBase:

[https://github.com/wireapp/wire-server](https://github.com/wireapp/wire- server)

<comment><USER15> We've been using Wire in our company for a few years now, I can't say it's a great UX or bug-free, but it gets the job done and supports most things we want like being available on all platforms, key verification (proper e2ee, not like Keybase that trusts the server on first use), (group) calling and (group) video calling, audited, open source, sending files of course, timed/expiring messages, no need for a phone number upon registering... it's really quite complete if you're willing to put up with it being a sluggish web/electron client. Well, and the network effect: I wish more people were on it so that wouldn't be a barrier, but Keybase had the same issue there so this might be a good place for Keybase users to continue chatting.

<comment><USER13> Have to agree on the Wire clients being sluggish. I've seen this on all platforms I use (even on mobile). Otherwise it's so nice to have something that doesn't require a phone number and allows up to three accounts to be setup in a client for free users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Handshake [1] is a great keybase alternative that doesn't even rely on centralization. All information is verifiable with the blockchain acting as the root of trust.

[1] [https://handshake.org](https://handshake.org)

<comment><USER6> I thought Handshake was decentralized DNS server. Keybase is primarily a secure chat app. Does Handshake have chat, chat room, and team chat functionality too?

<comment><USER17> > _Keybase is primarily a secure chat app._

Isn't that chat pretty new in Keybase's history?

<comment><USER18> Just over three years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you just want to share your public key safely, a .well-known directory on your domain works these days: [https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD](https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD)

<comment><USER20> Just a quick note on WKD since I've been bitten by this a few days ago: as soon as you set it up, some people will start using your keys automatically, without even knowing it (eg. it seems that ProtonMail automatically uses keys found on a WKD to encrypt outgoing mails). While in itself it's not a bad idea, you'd better prepare for this to avoid looking stupid like me, when you receive a casual encrypted mail and you're not able to read it (my private keys are air-gapped and until now I only expected to receive PGP-encrypted mail if it was worth the effort to read it offline).

<comment><USER21> Using WKD is also a good way to solicit useless "security"-related emails from people running questionable automated scanners.

<comment><USER22> I think you confused this with security.txt standard. WKD is not enumerable (unless explicitly configured like that) so the issue doesn't exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Scuttlebutt is an open source p2p gossip network (no central servers) that includes clients that implement chat, blogging, git and github replacements, Shamir's Secret sharing (splitting up a secret by encrypting it so that a number of your friends are needed to decrypt, via Dark Crystal [[https://darkcrystal.pw/]](https://darkcrystal.pw/\])), games and probably more that I am forgetting. You could easily place your public keys in your user profile.

<comment><USER15> Just looked in the repository, looks like there is an app for it on f-droid. Do you have experience with Manyverse / would you recommend it?

app [https://f-droid.org/app/se.manyver](https://f-droid.org/app/se.manyver) / website [https://www.manyver.se/](https://www.manyver.se/)

<comment><USER24> I've downloaded Manyverse from F-Droid so many times, hoping to finally use it for real...but I never could. I was particularly excited recently when an iOS app was released.

If you have a really close group of techy friends who don't mind hiccups and tinkering and don't mind a strictly non-private social medium, maybe it could work.

However, if you're trying to use it with normies, you might be disappointed. Private messages don't work at all, in my experience. Syncing with a pub server takes a couple of restarts, and there is no indicator in the GUI that any syncing is happening, so the user is left guessing.

I have nothing but respect for Andre Staltz and all the dedication and work that he and others have put into the app (and ecosystem) but, at least for me, it's just not quite there yet.

<comment><USER25> I'm only a recent user of SSB, many of the problems you describe seems related to the inherent nature of the protocol making it hard to onboard (ie. You almost always would need access to a pub to connect to the first few users).

On iOS you could try [https://planetary.social/](https://planetary.social/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm expecting Matrix/Riot has some of those like chat, and will develop some more.

And there'll be definitely alternatives, which is the beauty of FOSS.

</comment><comment><USER27> If anyone's looking for a fully open source, decentralized encrypted filesystem similar to KBFS, then checkout Peergos[1][2]. It's built on top of IPFS.

[1] [https://book.peergos.org](https://book.peergos.org)

[2] [https://github.com/peergos/peergos](https://github.com/peergos/peergos)

[disclaimer: Peergos founder]

</comment><comment><USER28> I am also curious here. I have used and advocated strongly for Keybase with a couple of local government clients to send sensitive files back and forth (not sensitive in the sense of national security, but more to preserve privacy and store encrypted at rest).

But I want to get ahead of the concern that Keybase is now owned by a Chinese company, which instantly compromises it.

PGP is dead on arrival, since it's an overcomplicated mess.

Keybase felt like WireGuard for its use case, just dead simple and also secure.

Update: I just want to clarify that I am happy for the Keybase team. This is clearly an Aquihire meant to bolster Zoom's security talent. And as a Zoom user, I'm generally happy about this development. But there will definitely be a concern about them being acquired by a Chinese company.

Update #2: I thought about FooBarWidget and others' comments, and I'm going to alter my wording. Zoom isn't a Chinese company, but their development team has been entirely based in China all this time and there have been concerns about that (which are entirely legitimate for certain groups like governments, in my opinion), especially given their communications aren't e2e encrypted.

<comment><USER29> Zoom is not a Chinese company. The founder merely was born in China. He is US citizen.

I am very put off by this anti-China rhetoric. Everything that even has a remote connection to China is now under suspicion. This is madness.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, Zoom is a US based company. Yes, they have a development team in China. It is valid to be concerned about the Chinese government exercising control of some sort over the local development team to put in a backdoor, just as our government seems to want to do to US developed products. No politicians really seem to like encryption very much. This is an overall geopolitical risk not unique to Zoom. But Zoom is not a Chinese company, it falls under US jurisdiction. And sovereign security risks are not unique to Chinese companies. Just saying that Zoom needs to be treated with caution because it is a "Chinese company" is lazy and inaccurate, and incorrectly characterizes both Zoom and where that risk originates.

<comment><USER28> Yes, and I've clarified and fixed my originally badly described wording. I'll let Zoom describe this themselves.

From Zoom's S-1 [1]:

"In addition, we have a high concentration of research and development personnel in China, which could expose us to market scrutiny regarding the integrity of our solution or data security features. Any security compromise in our industry, whether actual or perceived, could harm our reputation, erode confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures, negatively affect our ability to attract new customers and hosts, cause existing customers to elect not to renew their subscriptions or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, which could harm our business."

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1585521/000119312519083351/d642624ds1.htm)

<comment><USER30> Thanks for clarifying that, and yes, Zoom's s-1 writers did a good job of laying it out. The risks are real, and presenting them in an incorrect way makes it easy for people to dismiss the risks when they shouldn't. If the times comes because they're a Chinese company, and you check and see that they're a delaware c corp founded by a US citizen headquartered in the US, that would lead you to discount that risk. Clarifying that the risk comes from the development team being in a country where the government is in a contentious trade relationship with the US with an authoritarian regime (especially if the dev team isn't in one of the special economic zones) helps highlight what the risk is and confirm that it is a real threat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Thanks keybase for the free 100$ worth of lumens. You'll be remembered fondly.

<comment><USER32> What have you done with your lumens?

<comment><USER33> Immediately sold them and kept the cash

<comment><USER34> The most embarrassing pump-and-dump in recent memory.

<comment><USER35> I will always love them for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The Keybase acquisition is a reminder of the potential fragility of using centralized services (root servers, GitHub, CAs) to support decentralized tools (DNS, Git, TLS).

> ideally either FOSS or at least not run by a for-profit company

I agree with these aims, but _ideally_ I'd hope for the alternatives to be decentralized as well.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why not Mattermost ([https://mattermost.com/](https://mattermost.com/))? If the key feature of keybase was encrypted chat, seems like Mattermost solves the problem.

Or Signal?

<comment><USER38> Why would mattermost solve that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> For e2e encrypted chat there's [https://conversations.im](https://conversations.im). I've been using it for a while since it lets me bring my own domain and have been very happy. The Android client supports encryption with PGP keys and OMEMO (a double ratchet like Signal uses with some nice key trust options added on top to make it easy for novices, but configurable by experts).

<comment><USER40> A few days ago Conversations also learned how to make audio and video calls :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've only heard about [https://keys.pub](https://keys.pub)

</comment><comment><USER42> Signal App - Completely open source

[https://signal.org/en/](https://signal.org/en/)

<comment><USER43> Does signal still require me to share a phone number?

<comment><USER44> It does (or at least did, when I was using it). It only requires it for registration, so you could even use a disposable phone number, but regardless it is a nonsensical choice for something that could aspire to be a general- purpose chat application.

The server is open-source so you could host your own server -though that's not very practical due to the client situation (not really a variety of configurable ones, so you'd probably need to change/package/distribute the official).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Chat: Pick one of the many available. telegram, signal, wickr etc etc

KBFS: personally I switched to gpg encrypting important files on a NAS with encrypted backups to amazon glacier and backblaze.

Git: gitlab, github, bitbucket (just to name a few)

Encrypted messages out-of-band: Just use plain pgp/gpg

<comment><USER46> > Git: gitlab, github, bitbucket (just to name a few)

None of those hide the contents of your repo from the company that's hosting it. I suppose self-hosted Gitlab hides it the same way that Keybase does (the company's software sees your repo, but it's not stored in plaintext on their disks)

<comment><USER47> Yes. I _love_ Keybase Git for instant, immediate, safe backups of private repos. Keybase Git has been an absolutely killer feature for me since it came out and I'll miss it terribly if Keybase-the-software takes a turn for the worse. Now is the time to ensure I've got everything properly backed up, I guess.

[https://github.com/spwhitton/git-remote- gcrypt](https://github.com/spwhitton/git-remote-gcrypt) is probably the best alternative for now, but I'm wailing and gnashing my teeth at the prospect of going back to PGP keys. Maybe there's some way to intersect [https://github.com/FiloSottile/age](https://github.com/FiloSottile/age) and a git remote.

<comment><USER47> ... and [https://rovaughn.github.io/2015-2-9.html](https://rovaughn.github.io/2015-2-9.html). Maybe a weekend project hiding in here somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The big feature for me is easy and secure backup of things like dotfiles (and it not being secured ONLY by a password). I may just combine gpg and a private S3 bucket now along with some simple bash tooling.

<comment><USER49> Exactly how I'd been using it - keeping my dotfiles in a git repo that's not at GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I have been working on this decentralized key-value database: [https://github.com/kevacoin-project/kevacoin](https://github.com/kevacoin- project/kevacoin) Together with W3C's draft Decentralized Identifiers (DID: [https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/)), it could provide a decentralized alternative.

Not sure what is the best way to verify Twitter/Github account though. This has to be managed by users themselves. E.g. one user posts a proof in the Twitter account, the other user verifies the proof by checking the proof against the public key posted in the database.

<comment><USER51> Take a look of GunDB for DB?

Also for binding social account -- maybe take a look of [https://Maskbook.com](https://Maskbook.com) & [https://github.com/DimensionDev/Maskbook](https://github.com/DimensionDev/Maskbook) \- able to send encrypted post/comment on fb/twitter etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> We're working on a solution for user to link their Fb/twitter identity to a decentralized ID and post encrypted post/comment (even sending any crypto over) on Fb/twitter only viewable by friends *(not able to decrypted by Fb or NSA) -

[https://maskbook.com](https://maskbook.com)

Source code:

[https://github.com/DimensionDev/Maskbook](https://github.com/DimensionDev/Maskbook)

For now we're trying to integrate decentralized FS solution as well so eventually Fb/twitter can be merely an infrastructure layer

</comment><comment><USER52> keys.pub does the signing/validation part

<comment><USER53> keys.pub felt a lot like keybase when I first saw it. Now it seems like a no brainer go to replacement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm a light user of Keybase and used it primarily for validation & signing. The social identity verification was quite nice. It seems that's what most of the users here were using it for.

My suspicion is while we're not likely to see much new development from Keybase, the existing capabilities aren't likely to go away for some time.

The premise of validation/signing isn't a technically complex approach and I'm sure someone can create and FOSS it. The question however is - what features would you want integrated and what things did you find annoying?

</comment><comment><USER55> What's a good business model for this kind of company?[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23106043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23106043)

<comment><USER56> I would pay business money, for a way to manage, simply and conveniently, trusted developer identities (via a web of trust) to validate software packages. This is something of a larger concern, but if that was their product goal, it is a thing I would attach a dollar figure to

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> You can do the PGP part in a decentralized way with notations and proof- specific posts - including HN: [https://metacode.biz/openpgp/proofs](https://metacode.biz/openpgp/proofs)

And then there is WKD if you have a hosted site: [https://metacode.biz/openpgp/web-key- directory](https://metacode.biz/openpgp/web-key-directory)

</comment><comment><USER58> Can someone ELI5 why an alternative is really needed here?

<comment><USER16> There needs to be a way to verify keys and identity when using encryption as well as when using public key operations as a method of authentication in general.

Keybase, a centralized service, provided this ability [1]. Now that it was acquired by Zoom who has a history of poor privacy policies [2], people are looking for an alternative. One suggested alternative is Handshake [3], a decentralized system.

[1] [https://book.keybase.io/guides/proof-integration- guide](https://book.keybase.io/guides/proof-integration-guide)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom- tech...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-technology- security-coronavirus-video-conferencing)

[3] [https://handshake.org/](https://handshake.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Hopefully something with Activitypub can be created... splitting up lots of independent Keybases connected using federation protocols would be rad.

</comment><comment><USER60> The main thing I miss about keybase is the signing and verification of public resources like Github, mastodon accounts and personal websites.

</comment><comment><USER61> upspin.io seemed like a strong decentralized alternative from the same people who maintain the Go language, but unfortunately it seems defunct, judging by it's GitHub activity. Anyone know if it has been forked and maintained elsewhere?

</comment><comment><USER62> A bit late, but I just wrote [https://cryptologie.net/article/502/alternatives-to- pgp/](https://cryptologie.net/article/502/alternatives-to-pgp/)

</comment><comment><USER63> I host a git repo on Keybase. Is there a replacement specifically for this feature? I don't want to host the plaintext on any cloud, but I want the ciphertext to be highly available and easily re-encrypted in case of compromise.

</comment><comment><USER64> keybase is unfortunately one of those programs that combine many things into one - somewhat antithetical to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well.

For kbfs, tahoe-lafs is a nice alternative. I don't know about the fuse interface as I haven't used it, but it has some solid fundamentals behind it, actively being developed and can be self hosted.

GPG still works! GPG also is a swiss army knife, unfortunately. There is OpenBSD signify (or minisign) if you want signatures.

There is also age - [https://github.com/FiloSottile/age](https://github.com/FiloSottile/age)

</comment><comment><USER65> [https://keys.pub](https://keys.pub)

</comment><comment><USER66> GPG works, I don't know why anyone thought that anything else is needed.

<comment><USER67> See [https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp- problem.html](https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html).

I don't recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Bitrated is an interesting alternative for identity/reputation validation - wot based: [https://www.bitrated.com](https://www.bitrated.com)

</comment><comment><USER69> Can someone suggest an alternative for encrypted git?

<comment><USER70> git-remote-gcrypt: [https://github.com/spwhitton/git-remote- gcrypt](https://github.com/spwhitton/git-remote-gcrypt)

It's available in most distro repositories and works with almost any underlying remote repos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Honest question: What function does a server perform in end to end encryption?

Because I see that the Keybase client is open source but not the server…

<comment><USER72> You have to exchange data (public keys and the actual encrypted content) and if you can't do that peer to peer, you need something that facilitates that. For example, webrtc clients can talk over an encrypted channel to each other p2p if they are inside the same network. If not they need a TURN server to relay that information and do NAT (firewall traversal). For obvious reasons no one wants to be the service provider of anonymous encrypted content, hence a business opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> 10 years ago I was able to get good result from ads, but now it is an absolute waste of money and it's not worth it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER74> protonmail for mail/chat and protondrive (when it's released for kbfs) or tresorit

</comment><comment><USER75> Ethereum.

<comment><USER41> What does Etereum have to do with keybase?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Unironically WhatsApp it has its own end to end encryption

</comment><comment><USER77> [https://pgp.mit.edu/](https://pgp.mit.edu/) has been around before and will be around after Keybase is long gone.

</comment><comment><USER78> I'd suspect this is jumping the gun a lot bit. Keybase was running a free service for years and has matured a lot in the last year (post crypto debacle). There's nothing stopping them from 1. Letting Keybase go into maintenance mode. 2. Donating the server to a foundation. 3. Open sourcing there server.

In all these scenarios Zoom gets better security which is a win for the world :)

<comment><USER79> > In all these scenarios Zoom gets better security

I'm more worried about the scenarios in which keybase gets worse security. Zoom's attitude to security is terrible.

<comment><USER80> I am even more worried about the scenarios in which the rest of keybase ceases to exist if Zoom decide its not worth keeping online!</comment></comment></comment>


Godot 3.2 - <AUTHOR> https://godotengine.org/article/here-comes-godot-3-2 <comment><USER2> Been playing around with the Release Candidate, coming from Unity. Here's a list of things which I like / dislike:

++ Open License and friendly community.

++ The scene graph (node tree / prefabs) is well done, better than Unity. You can easily switch between scenes (Prefabs) through tabs and convert subtrees to separate scenes. Nesting scenes works really well.

++ The inbuilt scripting documentation is great.

\- C# is not fully there, yet. No Visual studio integration. Debugging through VSCode is a pain. WebAssembly Exports are not optimized yet. That's why I sticked with GDScript.

\+ GDScript is a nice language with optional type hinting. But refactoring can mostly be done through search/replace.

++ Windows and HTML/WebGL exports are super fast. I did not have problems since the RC.

\- The inbuilt editor for GDScripts is ok. But I'm missing my VIM shortcuts...

\- Arrays, dictionaries are not generic. Enums are not typesafe either. Bit me a few times.

\- You cannot inspect the scene in the editor visually while debugging. This is what I miss the most coming from unity. Some things are really hard to debug this way, for example if you use procedural generation.

\- 2D coords starting at the top left corner of the screen and increasing right/down is really confusing. If the player jumps, y goes down. It's a bit strange.

\- I'm a bit afraid regarding the +5000 open issues on github. I wonder, how they will handle that in the future...

<comment><USER3> concerning the +5000 open issues on github, when are you going to pick a few and see what you can do to fix them?

<comment><USER4> Why should he/she? If I support Godot financially, I'm not going to pick up issues. Yet, I should be allowed to raise concerns, shouldn't I?

<comment><USER5> You are allowed to raise concerns at any time even without financial support. However, it is considered poor form to waste the time of someone who is working without payment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I started developing RetroWar[1], I found Unity quite a disappointment, and so I developed my own custom engine in Kotlin. It works very well, but it took several years.

Recently I tried Godot because I was looking for something simple I could teach to kids[2], and I was amazed how easy it makes game creation. I made these games with no experience in just a couple of days!

[https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing](https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing)

[https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space](https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space)

GDscript is great. It's similar enough to Python that kids who know Python won't notice much difference, and it actually simplifies things for beginners, e.g. you can use objects without the need to define classes because they are created automatically when you create a script.

Godot is still a little rough around the edges, e.g. not everything has keyboard shortcuts, sometimes it crashes, some of the built in tools like map editor are very fiddly to use. But it's open source so I'm sure they will be fixed eventually (and if they aren't I can always do it myself.) The only major issue I can see for the future of Godot is the lack of exporters for Xbox, Playstation and Switch.

[1] [http://retrowar.net](http://retrowar.net)

[2] [https://loughton.me.uk/2020/01/22/godot.html](https://loughton.me.uk/2020/01/22/godot.html)

<comment><USER7> *lack of public exporters. Because of the NDAs around shipping for these platforms, no one can "advertise" that they have the exporters, but the truth is that there are consultants/gamedev shops who have done this work for all of the current platforms. You just have to get in touch with them via the community.

EDIT: This page has some backstory: [https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/consoles.html)

<comment><USER6> Sure you can hire someone to do the port - they do advertise it on that very page.

But there is another open source game library, Monogame, that distributes their code for free for consoles. You just have to vertify that you are have signed the NDA before you get access to the code. They advertise this. So there is no reason that Godot couldn't do the same if they wanted to open that code.

<comment><USER7> A lot of assumptions going on in this comment. You should actually consider testing some of them to see if they're true or just mistakes on your part.

Putting that aside: developers who do this kind of (difficult, tedious and thankless) work are entitled to ask compensation for their effort, on top of everything else they do for free.

<comment><USER6> Yes people are entitled to sell proprietary forks of free software - it's a non-copy left license so perfectly legal. However it puts Godot in a poor position relative to competitors. If you want a free console game engine you could use Monogame. If you want a non-free console game engine then you could use Unity or Unreal and you would have the advantage that you know up-front what it will cost and you know that it will be well supported by well-known developers throughout the lifetime of the console. Godot is a very compelling choice for PC and mobile, but the current situation of "there is console support but it's a secret so we can't tell you who makes it, how much it costs and how long it will be supported in future" makes it very difficult to recommend Godot over those alternatives to anyone developing console titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Folks, if you love Godot make sure to support them on their Patreon: [https://www.patreon.com/godotengine](https://www.patreon.com/godotengine)

(I'm not affiliated with Godot, I just use it and love it)

<comment><USER9> They're currently at $10,000 a month, or $120,000 a year. That's really amazing!

<comment><USER10> That doesn't even pay for a single developer if factoring in taxes and other costs of employment.

<comment><USER11> I think there's only two full time developers on the project, and both are based in Brazil, so this actually goes a really long way.

<comment><USER12> Akien (project manager) isn't based in Brazil, he's French. And Juan (project manager) lives in Argentina (according to his GitHub).

George however, who has been employed only recently does live in Brazil (according to his GitHub).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Godot has been a breath of fresh air for me lately (been running master branch for a while) and I know that it is going to only get better. I can't wait for the vulkan renderer to be ready, I think it's going to a game changer for godot.

After Epic originally promised to make linux a first class citizen, I went all in ue4, but they lied and went back on all those promises, and I have since moved to a completely open source gamedev pipeline and I think it's the future.

For example, think about how much mods make or break game longetivity and communities. If valve hadnt given us world hammer, there would be no counterstrike, no tf2, no garrys mod, no age of chivalry and ergo no chivalry medieval warfare. The residual effects of modding capabilities are huge, and having formats that are easy to work with with normal tooling (like gltf) mean open source gaming in a game engine like godot (or a few others, armory3d is another) could be a sleeping giant just in the early stages of waking.

<comment><USER14> Did they ditch the entire idea of having Linux support or is it just that they were slow on improving the compatibility?

<comment><USER15> Epic just acquired Rocket League and removed Linux support.

<comment><USER16> and macOS support too, [https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/23/21078948/rocket- league-mac...](https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/23/21078948/rocket-league-mac- linux-support-final-patch-march-features-online-offline)

<comment><USER15> Especially annoying because we used to play it all the time at the office and we've all got macbooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I loved the tone of this article. The parts where it says things like "Bastiaan did this, Yuri did that..." is what I always want to see in these kind of technology news.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks to the Godot devs. I've been using the 3.2 betas over the last months and I was totally happy with the experience. But I am happy that I can work with an official release version now which makes it easier to have others use the codebase as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone here using Godot for VR/AR dev? ...curious what's the story here and how it stands against Unity on this front since I'm lately interested with developing VR productivity apps and using a game-engine seems like kind of the only viable cross-platform solution for this, the path that others have taken too.

But which engine... that's an open question, and I'm not that fond of Unity :)

<comment><USER8> I can recommend Godot for VR. I switched from Unity to Godot a couple of months ago and haven't looked back. I'm developing for the Quest on Mac and Godot is significantly faster in building to run on your device. Plus, the hot-reload feature means that you don't need to rebuild every time (although once your Quest goes to sleep you need to rebuild). Other than that, I love Godot's node system, that it's compatibile with a mulitude of languages (although GDScript is awesome and I didn't need to add C# or something as of yet).

If you're looking at the Quest, Holger Dammertz is doing an awesome job with the Oculus Quest Toolkit[0] where I'm also a contributor.

[0]: [https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit](https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit)

<comment><USER18> Thanks! My dev setup would also be "for Quest, on a Macbook" 80% of the time, so it means a lot if you found the very same scenario to work :)

...still hacking around with Unity, but after I get a basic PoC of what I'm doing I might switch to Godot (with C# as the language) for developing the actual MVC.

<comment><USER8> Sounds good. Let me know if you have any questions =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tried to learn it a little but I did not manage to understand how it works, I don't really like the whole WYSIWYG thing, it forces the developer to surrender control, and you waste a big amount of time teaching yourself how it works internally, time that could be spent being productive with a simple renderer.

It also seems to support c++ as "gdnative", although it requires another compiler to link against godot's binaries. It seems awkward because you still need to use the godot editor, and there is still a lot of interfacing to write.

It seems like a good alternative to unity, but in the end, all I want is an engine, not a "framework" or some awkward scene editor with some kind of Node hierarchy/interface.

I could say the same thing about UE4. I hear everywhere that's it's the place to go, that "everybody uses it and it's the norm in the industry if you want to make a game from scratch", but the reality is that those frameworks are too big and too feature rich. It sounds like they want to attract young developers to lock them into those awkward frameworks, because they advertise it as being full-featured engines, but small developers might not really need to focus on bleeding edge rendering, so it doesn't make sense.

I know there are engines like Ogre3D, but I would rather spend time learning an actual universal graphics API that works on all hardware, which has more value on a resume, and I can just use what I need. All other things like audio, animation, inputs, physics, etc are available as C++ libraries.

Those frameworks are saying "see? you can make your own game with those tools!", but when you actually learn how a computer works, and know how to write code, you realize you want to avoid those frameworks because they conceal too much from the programmer, and usually you don't want a developer to not understand what the framework is doing. I guess this is why people have a problem with certain object-oriented practices and abstraction.

EDIT:

Here is a nice video which benchmarks unity against a simple, very similar from-scratch equivalent. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y)

<comment><USER20> I think you are missing the fundamental purpose behind game engines. Game and graphics programming is really hard, and at times unapproachable to a lot of people. Moreover, in the real world, even experts prefer to use game engines just due to the fact that it is almost guaranteed that a raw renderer you write yourself is not going to be as good and optimized as a game egnine's renderer.

Using game engines may not suffice to your use case, but for a lot of people that's the best way to develop games. This argument is similar to using a systems level language vs a higher level language.

I myself prefer game frameworks over either raw graphics APIs and game engines, since it provides me with my preferred level of control while meeting my particular needs. I can see where you come from, if your goal is to learn and highlight that in your resume, writing and experimenting against the graphics APIs are likely the best bet. But for a lot of people, their main goal differs from yours, which is to... make a game.

<comment><USER19> If one doesn't understand how a game works, a framework is not going to help. This person will probably shoot himself in the foot.

Here is a good video about benchmarking unity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInaI3pU19Y)

<comment><USER21> Most of the effort that goes into a large game project is not in the runtime code, but in content creation: you probably only need one renderer or one physics system, but lots of levels, lots of characters with unique behaviors. So what does every one of the top general-purpose game engines provide? An IDE geared around content creation.

It is no surprise that you can find a benchmark where a general-purpose engine is slow. If you do nothing you go fast, but if you are supporting general- purpose use cases you add a lot of feature overhead, so you become slow. Why do pros use it, then? Because - if the engine is sufficiently extensible - they can use the built-in stuff as a placeholder and replace that subsystem with a custom one later. Project ships, everyone's happy.

With microbenchmarks based around scaling simple elements like "thousands of bullets" like the one in the video this point on general-purpose elements is especially important. As soon as you want to add any additional behaviors to those bullets your performance is going to plummet. And from a game design perspective, scale becomes boring very quickly. A player cannot really appreciate seeing more than a few hundred things on-screen at any moment.

So the way scenes are actually benchmarked in industry is by building out more of the behavior, adding placeholder assets at the estimated level of detail, seeing what frametimes result, and developing a scene budget around that. It all feeds back into the content creation pipeline again, because an optimized scene will have more care given to each of its assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I stumbled upon Godot after seeing (and buying) [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189230/Door_in_the_Woods...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189230/Door_in_the_Woods/)

It's an ascii roguelike with a neat 3d aesthetic.

Godot was a pleasure to install and play around with it. I recommend taking a look!

</comment><comment><USER23> Congrats to all 450 contributors who worked on this over the last 10 months! GoDotEngine is something on my list of things to get into as soon as time allows.

<comment><USER24> The amazing thing to me is that 300 of those contributors were contributing for the first time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My son (10 years old) wants to learn how to make games so we sat down together and went through the tutorial from the beginning. Very enjoyable.

<comment><USER26> Nice! I made a tiny game with a car for my 3 year old and he's already asking me "how do I do this too"...

<comment><USER25> Awesome! Nice to be able to share the joy of programming using an activity kids already love.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Supporting the web target for c# is a HUGE deal for me as someone that makes hobbyist game jam projects and doesn't want to learn another language (already know c#, not thrilled about learning GDScript).

I can't understate how much of a big deal the growing support for c# is. Both for non-game devs who want to dip their feet in making games and also luring in current Unity developers.

<comment><USER28> GDScript is just Python that has some tweaks.

For example to preload a child node you put this in a node's member space.

onready var enemy = $Enemy

Variables needing to be declared with the var keyword is the biggest change in the language.

var flag = some_function_result()

Other changes include expanding Python with more keywords useful for the editor and game programming.

It is very nice for prototyping. Still looking forward to that C# AOT support in later releases.

<comment> vincent-toups It doesn't have lambda, even the bad lambda from python.

<comment><USER29> This is an intentional design decision in the language - not having lambda functions / functions as first-class citizens makes the code easier to optimize internally.

<comment> vincent-toups It also makes me feel like I'm programming in 1987. LuaJIT does fine with lambdas and I'd bet good money chibi-scheme is faster than GDScript. Its not a really good excuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am refreshed by Godot's versioning scheme. Point releases are something to get excited about.

</comment><comment><USER31> I make 2D games and it seems that Godot is good for that. I'm scared of GDScript though, e.g. not being able to use a package registry that normally comes with standard languages. What's everyone's experience?

<comment><USER32> After looking into as many engines as I could find, I chose godot for a 2D game. I don't have significant game creation experience, but I've consumed a lot of media and pay close attention. While I'm not neck deep in development, GDScript seems perfectly reasonable. Most of what it's used for is in making things that are somewhat custom/demand labor anyway. Menus, object interactions, etc. It just takes a few days of playing around with test scenes.

What I have yet to try to tackle is the C import tool. Let's say I have a grid of many objects that interact with each other. I don't necessarily want GDScript to be running the logic for 10,000 objects (an extreme number, I'd likely limit it to less, but I still like the idea of keeping performance in mind). So C is a good choice. But suddenly I have to establish and maintain a big connection between GDScript and C. Everytime a feature is added it has to be added in several places. Maybe this is just the way things are done and I should just do the work. I'm worried it is the wrong way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I feel like I used Godot wrong when I read these comments. I did three small games and it seemed to me that everything in Godot was put on the same complexity level. Everything is simple, but super simple tasks have become harder. And then there are inconsistencies like the sprites are not in the node tree but in another space. I don't get it. I found it really hard to get my ideas into the engine. The low level approach would take just a fraction of the time for me.

</comment><comment><USER34> This looks really nice. Every time I see Godot, I tell myself that one day I'll get around to making that game I dreamed up in undergrad.

</comment><comment><USER35> Need to try it ASAP, although I see the issue that prevented my kids from using it ([https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/24890](https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/24890)) is still open - managed accounts present a few challenges, but I hope this has been sorted somehow.

<comment><USER36> Would running it inside a container and creating shortcut for your kids be a possible workaround?

<comment><USER35> On a Mac? No.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've been working with Godot/Websockets lately and it has been really enjoyable -- excited for Juan's 4.0 vulkan work!

</comment><comment><USER38> The UI looks really polished, but it's missing one crucial feature - multi- monitor ("window") support - with docking.

</comment><comment><USER39> Just in time to try it on the global game jam next weekend!

</comment><comment><USER40> I've been waiting for this! My friend and I were starting to doubt it would arrive.

</comment><comment><USER41> It took rather some poking around the site to discover that Godot is (apparently) a game engine coded in C#.

Hint for people posting release announcements: you could save a great many people quite a lot of time, cumulatively, with just a single short sentence in the first paragraph of your announcement. You probably would pick up some new participants who would have given up in disgust before they could discover what the hell the thing is.

<comment><USER42> It's not coded in C#, it's written in C++.

Release notes for a new version are not the place to list all the features of the engine. You can literally click on the home page and see "Object-oriented API with language options such as GDScript, C#, C++ and visual scripting.".

If people give up "in disgust" because they can't find what language the engine uses for scripting immediately in the first sentence of a release announcement then they're probably not cut out for making any kind of software which requires digging through documentation.

<comment><USER41> So even looking around and following links, I still guessed wrong about what the hell it is.

 _Nobody_ asked for, or needs, a list of "all the features" in a release announcement. Saying what the project is (such as that it is some kind of "engine", and maybe even what kind?) would have been a completely different, and much shorter and overwhelmingly more useful statement.

What should motivate a reader who cannot even tell what it is to spend time groveling around to find out whether they might be interested in the thing? Hint: most projects are not interesting to most people. Forced to guess, the best guess has to be "no".

I am repeatedly astonished that such elementary reasoning seems beyond so many.

As it happens, for example, a game engine in C# is of zero interest to me, but one in C++ could be quite interesting. I dismissed it as a direct consequence of the failure of the announcement to give me any reason to pay it any more attention.

<comment><USER42> If having to click on the logo to go to the home page sends you into such an apoplectic rage then I don't know what to tell you. If you look at, for instance, the .NET Core 3.0 release notes[1] there is no mention in the first few paragraphs of what it is. You have to click away to see it.

"I am repeatedly astonished that such elementary reasoning seems beyond so many." Perhaps you're just wrong? If everywhere you go smells like shit you should check your shoes.

[1][https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net- core-3-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-core-3-0/)

<comment><USER41> I realize that by now I should not be astonished, only disappointed. It is probably not your fault; education has been in decline for a long time.

I feel no slight temptation to look at .NET announcements, nor to draw conclusions on good practices from them.

But all of the apoplectic rage is clearly on your side.

<comment><USER5> >education has been in decline for a long time.

Is this supposed to be a joke? The information exists but you didn't try to find it.

<comment><USER41> I was specifically offered no reason why I should have any desire to dig around and find out more. That is the problem.

It is the entire topic of my original post.

Really, what would be so terrible about a short sentence in an announcement so that people who don't already know all about it get some hint at what it is? No one has suggested anything like an answer. Instead, I find rage that I don't, what, just automatically go digging deep into project pages for _every single new thing_ announced, just in case whatever it is might turn out to be interesting?

Everyone has a lot of demands on their time and attention. A person writing an announcement is necessarily trying to communicate and engage. Concealing the topic sabotages the effort, right out of the gate.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hubris & the Meaning of Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/hubris-the-meaning-of-life.html

<comment><USER2> There is no meaning to life, once that's accepted you can create your own meaning. Look around, decide what you want to do and do it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this is a follow up to my previous post: A Rigged Game. <http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/02/a-rigged-game.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, Jordan Cooper & I have a pretty epic debate going on: [http://jordancooper.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/trees-sharks- ch...](http://jordancooper.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/trees-sharks-change/)</comment></comment>


Ripple – Chat with people nearby - <AUTHOR> http://ripplechat.io <comment><USER2> If I want to chat with people nearby, I would go up, come to them and start chatting with them. In person.

...just kidding, I am an asocial person, I don't speak with other people.

<comment><USER3> Exept with us or course. So I take it you'd be someone willing to try the AI as shown in the 'Her' movie? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4)

<comment><USER4> As long as I don't have active reinforcement to remind me you aren't just randomly generated text by a machine somewhere, I'm good.

Which also means I'd prefer my creepy stalker AI to speak in a monotone machine voice. More relatable that way.

<comment><USER3> ...Hello Dave. What are you doing here Dave?"... (Hal)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought they were related to Ripple Labs ([https://ripple.com/](https://ripple.com/)) and the Ripple cryptocurrency due to the recent Bitcoin and cryptocurrency craze; however it seems they are unrelated and just happened to hit upon the same name for their chat app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right there's nothing to do with Ripple Labs, we named it through a hackathon before we found it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Meet like-minded people". Where like-minded means "uses the same OS as me".

Sorry, couldn't resist. Congratulations on shipping. It looks like a great utility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we hope it can be really useful, maybe for conferences and events, never know. We'll see how it goes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> WeChat (by Tencent) has similar feature, but you must first add people to friend list then chat.

However this raise an interesting topic:

How to securely verify that a device is indeed nearby and not spoofing it?

You can spoof your GPS coordinates easily on Android at least.

<comment><USER8> Why would that be a problem?

Your location should not be an identifying value but more or less a topic.

Being able to set your parameters to some location somewhere and chat with "random people" there seems like a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER7> > Why would that be a problem?

Hmm, the same reason you wanna keep your conversations private?

I can think of few cases, like if you want to giving nearby people coupons, I mean really nearby, not random guy on the other side of the planet trying to re-sell your coupons.

How to use a non-hackish, non-intrusive way to make content exclusive to local users?

Providing an ad-hoc wifi is not the solution because people may need public Internet activities and a device can connect only to one access point at a time.

<comment><USER9> The edge cases just aren't worth doing any extra work for.

<comment><USER7> All innovations come from edge cases. Cheers :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6642100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6642100)

<comment><USER11> I remember seeing this when it was announced but didn't bother using it because I was too lazy to sign up an account. I like that this one doesn't require an account to engage allowing me to try before I sign up

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought about this idea myself. But then I noticed there were tons of good apps doing exactly this. This stopped me from implementing it, because i would not be "first app in the market", because I woudnt have the unfair advantage of being first.

(yobong, palringo, whoshere)

<comment><USER13> Yes this. Actually the first time I came across a (variation of) this idea, it was years ago and brought up by a co-worker. I have been tinkering with the idea, and also came to the same conclusion, that virality / marketing in general were probably going to play the part hugely, as like you've stated, this has been done a lot..

Maybe it's something that people do not want.

I could see this having great potential in the dating/flirt sectors obvously ;) But you could also imagine things like "shit I think I left my jacket at x/y, anyone found it? " at a festival. Anonimity would probably be mandatory for success.

Remember how well Latitude faired?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You guys should check out Yobongo. A similar location-based chat app which has since closed down post-seed round. You might like to see what worked / didn't work for them.

<comment><USER14> They were around in 2011.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I often find myself wondering about an application like this. Anyone know if there's something similar for android?

<comment><USER16> Google has in a vague and useless way attempted something like it in Google+ on mobile - there's a "Nearby" option that at this point appears to be people within the same metro area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This app makes me think of Popcorn..

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn- messaging/id71841670...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/popcorn- messaging/id718416705?mt=8)

I wonder if more people are using Ripple because so far I haven't had much conversations with Popcorn.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using the beta since it came out and have loved the way the app has grown. I'm really interested in seeing its potential in conferences or large towns.

It's small and well focused, they've opened some code from it and seem to be doing a good job of being active in chat. Give it a try.

<comment><USER19> It's just fantastic to hear from the Cocoapods team. Ripple wouldn't exist without it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure about the timeline who released first, but there is popcorn chat app which allows to chat with people who are within one mile from you it was featured here a while back. The functionality seems to be the same less or more.

<comment><USER19> Hmm, popcorn is a single chatroom within a location. Ripple is multiple chatrooms within a location, but based on a topic. There is no signup. That actually creates some really interesting use cases. Hopefully, you'll decide to try it out! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of Trepia which tried a similar thing only on desktops, 10 years ago. It died, unsurprisingly. I had been wondering when someone would revive the idea.

</comment><comment><USER22> When its android app is coming?

</comment><comment><USER23> As Jeremy Clarkson would say... What can possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice work guys. Loved the articles on Medium as well.

<comment><USER19> Thank you, hopefully our little hackathon experience will inspire others to build their own Apps too! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Random? Why not all the people?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you can by inviting people with our per room invitation feature. There will be a need to have chat room concept so people know what to chat on.

<comment><USER25> Cool, think you can get a lan based room going?

As others have said been keen to do something very similar. Glad someone got off their ass and did it.

I always envisioned it useful at parties and places where the internet may be too congested but the lan/wlan not so much: read conferences

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks nice, but IOS only...

</comment><comment><USER27> nice work. great if can read and send contact info like fb/email..

</comment><comment><USER28> having trouble finding on the app store!

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the direct link [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ripple- chat/id787142731?ls=1...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ripple- chat/id787142731?ls=1&mt=8)

Probably take some time for AppStore to process those keywords, stay tuned :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sausage party

</comment><comment><USER30> is there anyway you can forcibly push the app to the attractive woman that gets on my train?

no? oh ok.

</comment><comment><USER31> how does the chat happen through bluetooth? what are the technical details?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's through the internet</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Providing accommodation to employees? - <AUTHOR>

SF rent is through the roof and there is no tax benefits to people who rent apartments anywhere in the US even though they can't afford to buy the mortgage.
Would it be possible to provide Accommodation to the empoyees as one of the Job Benefits ? Is the rent paid by the Company can be counted as expenses and not taxed ? <comment><USER2> Lodging is generally taxable. [http://smallbusiness.chron.com/taxability- employerprovided-l...](http://smallbusiness.chron.com/taxability- employerprovided-lodging-21478.html)

Tax considerations aside, providing lodging would put the company in the business of being a landlord, which presumably most companies want no part of.

<comment><AUTHOR> The link pretty much answers my question! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Providing accommodations with employment seems like a slippery slope. You are a little mistaken about "no tax benefits to people who rent apartments anywhere in the US" though. There are some states that allow state tax deductions or credits for rent - Massachusetts is one of them. That only reduces your state tax liabilities though, not federal.

(And for what it is worth, California actually does have a renter's credit. Unfortunately, to qualify your adjusted gross income must be less than $35,659 as a single filer, or $71,318 for a married couple filing jointly.)

<comment><AUTHOR> So yes Tax benefits for most engineers are pretty much off the table. I am more interested in seeing Accommodation as part of the Job Benefits. I am willing to take 10-20% less salary than other employees if I am provided accommodation by the Company. It could become a win-win situation if companies can write off accommodation as expenses.</comment></comment>


Features from Apple's Details Page Left Unmentioned - <AUTHOR> http://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/1541d00e-86cf-4a8d-b734-b05d2ec8e3be/69a5a6700a77322f5ef44d69ac1d5dfb <comment><USER2> "Capture a region of the screen QuickTime Player lets you record part of the screen, such as a specific window. It's perfect for creating a video tutorial of an application."

Don't think I've seen that mentioned elsewhere--relevant to the discussion on new OS features potentially replacing 3rd-party applications.

"OS X Lion includes a built-in restore partition, allowing you to repair or reinstall OS X without the need for discs."

Relevant to the install discussion.</comment>


Facebook is now merging instagram and messenger chats into one service - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/15/facebook-is-now-merging-instagram-and-messenger-chats-into-one-service/ <comment><USER2> This ruins Instagram for me entirely. The separation is part of what I enjoyed and needed.

This just makes me want to leave both platforms, not embrace them as one.

<comment><USER3> They aren't doing this for users. They're doing this so that they can stand in front of Congress and say "Well _actually_ Facebook and Instagram aren't two separate things, they're really just 1 thing, so it's impossible for you to break us up into 2 companies, sorry!"

<comment><USER4> This is very true

what they fear most is

Instagram and Whatsapp getting split up from Facebook

And then it becoming a contest of

FB vs Instagram Vs Whatsapp

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __

If they integrate them in, then they get two good side effects (the real intended effectS) in addition to 'easier for users'

A) Very hard to split it up, as it 'breaks the experience for the users

B) After the split the three companies are FORCED TO WORK TOGETHER

it becomes three companies sharing three shared products

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __*

Another fact that has to be considered is

A lot of Instagram's growth was done leveraging what was learnt at Facebook and using Facebook users

Now you get the danger that

The three companies (if split - FB, Instagram, Whatsapp) could feed and grow competitors to each other

By having them so interconnected, it also prevents one company to 'build in' a possible competitor to another and grow it quickly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally I'm a huge fan. Instagram has never been for me. But it appears to be becoming a relatively popular IM tool. I thought I was going to have to install it on my phone at some point to communicate with friends but this lets me stick with the same one facebook app that I have been living with for years.

I can't wait until I can drop WhatsApp too.

I mean ideally people would start using something open like Matrix or even XMPP but I'll still take wins when I can get them. The less separate networks the better as far as I am concerned.

</comment><comment><USER6> Big fan of this, hoping they integrate WhatsApp and its end to end encryption to this joint project soon as well

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it's time to unlink my fb account from instagram. I really don't want the chats merged.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks, I hate it</comment>


Don't Get Burned By Heatmaps - <AUTHOR> http://www.gazehawk.com/blog/dont-get-burned-by-heatmaps/

<comment><USER2> _After reviewing the individual heatmaps, however, we get the impression that the site might have a bit too much going on_

Normal A/B split tests have a similar issue. Let's say you have a sales page and you're testing colors. Red buy button, a blue button, a green button. And let's say blue wins overall with a high level of confidence.

Without drilling down (and most systems I've worked with are bad at this or can't do it at all) you can't tell if certain _types_ of user actually preferred other scenarios. For example, visitors from east Asia might convert WAY better for the red button (red being a lucky color in China). And visitors coming from _certain sites_ might always convert better on the green.

Problem is, your split test results show the overall results and so you optimize with the blue.. when your A/B tool could have analyzed the data and suggested segments for you. Does this tool exist (without getting users to guess segments up front)? If not, there's a ton of money being left on the table.

<comment><USER3> Actually, this is a problem with most entry level tools. Professional level tools like Omniture Test and Target or Optimost with Autonomy Segments handle MVT testing per segment, segment defined by external variables (appended data or data from Dataxu et al), business variables (return customer, prospect, etc.), or just online variables (IP address Geo, repeat vs. new visitor, etc.)

Professional level, btw, is defined as "costs a lot" and "are painful to use" and "have poor interfaces"; more recent tools give up some of the power and cost for ease of use.

However, as you point out, these easier MVT tools (or Split-Test tools) focus on showing the "winner" or "winning variables", winner defined as "most impactful on the total traffic or sample of this traffic during this time". You are right that this is not the final answer... but it's a good starting place; if you solve for the majority of users, it's usually the biggest step. Then solving for unique smaller groups can often result in lower volume but higher value conversions... if you have time.

That being said, including segment variables in the analysis is a wonderful thing to do, and I encourage it. I look forward to when Visual Website Optimizer and other "entry level" tools include these in their analyses by default... and we can look to the end of Optimost, Omniture TnT, and the other "enterprise" tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool stuff, Brian! It'd be interesting to try to cluster users based on what bits of the page they look at (women 65+ look at navigation breadcrumbs significantly more than average, say).

<comment><USER5> GazeHawk intern here -- I wrote the post. Our post next week is going to be focused more on using different clustering metrics as a way of making the data easier to understand.

We definitely have plans for running some big studies where we can do demographic comparisons, since that sort of information helps us bring a lot of value to our customers, but it might not be for a few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like you need a heatmap for the variance as well as the mean.

<comment><USER5> That's an interesting idea... I'll see if anything comes of it.

<comment><USER7> This was my first thought also (although 7 hours later!), it may be interesting to look at skew as well as variance (kurtosis is probably going too far), the difference between diffuse normally distribution and split peaks...

It may even be interesting to do some kind of k-means, would be awesome to see that correlate with demographic...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To ensure a heatmap does not "eliminate the element of time", the heatmap could show later-looked-at spots with more desaturated colors.

Of course, this has the same problem as the main point – that you can't tell whether a spot is medium-saturated because everyone looks at it in the middle of browsing or because some people see it at the beginning and others see it only at the end. Still, this problem, like the article's, could be fixed by moultano's suggestion of making a heatmap for the variance as well as the value.

Or you could sacrifice the display of time, and display _variance_ as saturation – less-variant, more-sure spots would have more saturated colors. This would be easier to read than two separate heatmaps for value and variance.

</comment><comment><USER9> During my final year project for my BSc, I tried to address the problem of losing the temporal data from eye tracking in heatmaps with an accelerated replay, heatmap animation. Here's an example:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L319pLmzHVc&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L319pLmzHVc&feature=channel_video_title)

This video shows a selection of sittings from radiologists reporting on chest xrays.

If I recall correctly it is sped up approximately 5 x realtime.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice visualization! We have something similar that we generate:

<https://s3.amazonaws.com/gazehawk-public/example_track.mp4>

Definitely a step up from heatmaps, though I think there's a lot to be said for providing data as a static image rather than a heatmap, especially when they are being added to a powerpoint or PDF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Though I'm pretty optimistic about the possibility for algorithmic user interface design (or at least quantitative evaluation), I've yet to see any conclusive studies on the matter. Anybody got any hard info on this?

<comment><USER5> I think it's really difficult to rigorously evaluate that sort of thing. Different websites serve different purposes and need different designs.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I suppose different sites will need slightly different fitness functions but I'm confident in the future of automated design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Using the example of GazeHawk, it looks like they claim to work using your system's built-in webcam. Being interested in eye tracking for non-advertising purposes, I did a few calculations, and I fail to see how this is possible at typical monitor distance and typical webcam resolutions.

Does anyone have any insight as to how this is done? Currently, I'm highly skeptical of that these heat maps are the least bit accurate.

<comment><USER12> What calculations did you do?

As cofounder of GazeHawk, I've written on different aspects of this topic previously [1, 2]. Is that information helpful / can you elaborate on your skepticism?

[1] <http://www.gazehawk.com/blog/on-accuracy/>

[2] [http://www.quora.com/GazeHawk/What-broad-computer-vision- tec...](http://www.quora.com/GazeHawk/What-broad-computer-vision-techniques- does-GazeHawk-use-for-gaze-tracking)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the links, they were very interesting.

I did basic trigonometry, and came up with an estimate of about 50 pixels accuracy using a high-res, 3rd party webcam. That's why I doubt claims about built-in webcams, since they're typically pretty low resolution.

Your first link mentions an accuracy of around 70 pixels on a MacBook Pro, which is impressive but doesn't strike me as impossible (assuming FaceTime HD camera, which is 1280x720, I believe).

<comment><USER12> While the resolution of the webcam is (obviously) important when discerning accuracy, I feel like you may be conflating two terms here. Specifically, going from the resolution of the webcam to an estimate of so many pixels of accuracy using basic trigonometry will necessarily depend on the method you're using to convert the webcam input into eye-tracking data.

The <70 pixel figure for GazeHawk's accuracy is based on testing against real, labeled training data. That is the distance, on the screen, by which our calculated gazepoint differs from the true location at which the user's gaze was directed. It is only loosely correlated with webcam resolution, in that a higher webcam resolution corresponds to a larger pipeline - more input pixels being dumped into the eye tracking algorithm. I could be wrong, but it sounds like you're discussing the size of the eyes in the input image.

Also, at this point a discussion of accuracy vs. precision becomes germane. The use of higher resolution video as an input can often impact one but not the other.

<comment><USER11> _I feel like you may be conflating two terms here._

Probably. :-)

 _I could be wrong, but it sounds like you're discussing the size of the eyes in the input image._

I believe I am. I assume that increased pixel count in the eye region corresponds directly with increased accuracy. This could be accomplished by either moving the camera closer to the eye, or by using a higher resolution camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pardon my ignorance, but I find your efforts quite insignificant. If you were to ask me where most people looked on that example, I could accurately tell you what got the most looks first, second, third etc, without ever seeing your heatmap. Do I really need a third party to tell me people like boobs more than Ron Paul?

I'd like to add that the length of eye contact is irrelevant especially to a metric that is more valuable, interpretation. Let's say that we can determine (or even narrow down) users interpretation of content and heatmap the relevance to their visit. If we could take a pro-active stance we could predict future visits and adjust the content accordingly, not be reactionary and simply say (after the user is gone) that people looked at boobs more than Ron Paul.

Just my two cents, sorry if I was a dick.

<comment><USER14> Did you even read the article?

The _aggregate_ confirms what you're saying - that people will look down the middle at all the half-naked people.

But look at the individual heatmaps, it seems like a not-insignificant number of people followed more text than images, some drifted all over the place, etc etc.

That's the entire _point_ of the post I think - pointing out that aggregates can be deceiving when the distribution is not even close to uniform.</comment></comment>


Bulletproof Coffee - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ryanio.com/post/78773055249/the-soylent-alternative-you-can-make-tomorrow-morning <comment><USER2> The man who "invented" this can be found here: [http://www.bulletproofexec.com/](http://www.bulletproofexec.com/)

If this doesn't convince you I don't know what will: _Can you really lose 100 pounds without using exercise, upgrade your IQ by more than 12 points, and stay healthy by sleeping less than 5 hours? It took more than 15 years and $300,000 to learn how to reach the Bulletproof® state of high performance. And it's all here on the blog for you._

Notice he thinks he's got a registered trademark on the word Bulletproof.

Do we really need more crapily to none researched dietary fads on HN?

<comment><USER3> Your argument is ad hominem. The man who wrote this article has posted sources for each claimed benefit.

<comment><USER2> That is a small collection of supporting research in sources neither of us is qualified to verify of individual parts of this dietary suggestion. Not conclusive research into Bulletproof coffee itself. Some pieces being seemingly supportive doesn't mean anything about the whole.

<comment> __--__ _neither of us is qualified_

That kind of thinking is how we got the government sanctioned food pyramid. I'd rather think for myself, thanks.

<comment><USER2> I don't follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bulletproof coffee is a great breakfast (and snack) for anybody on a high fat diet like keto or Atkins. This is because while on these diets, your body has put itself in a state where it can more easily convert fat to energy. However, people on a regular high carb diet will not be able to make the most of all that fat and will just be hungry and tired after an hour.

Don't get me wrong, I think most people need more good fat in their diet. But if you're on a "regular" diet, the fat needs to be a supplement, not a replacement.

</comment><comment><USER5> Call me old school, but I love my mediterranean (italian) diet: a balance mix of all the nutrients in normal portions. I think nothing is really bad for you in right in normal quantities. Try to eat a 6oz steak with a nice salad (EVOO, salt, lemon juice for dressing) instead of a 16oz steak with a bunch of sauces. Afraid of carbs? Try eating 60g of pasta next time instead of a salad bowl of it.

<comment><USER6> >I think nothing is really bad for you in right in normal quantities.

That's either false or tautological. Mercury is bad for you in any quantity. If you say "the normal quantity for mercury is zero", then "nothing is bad for you in normal quantities" is a meaningless statement.

<comment><USER5> I'm glad to see you grasped my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really understand how this is an 'alternative' to soylent.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a perfect 1:1 replacement as you can't just drink Bulletproof Coffee to get all your nutrients. But, start your day with a cup of it to boost nutrition, focus, and satiety. Follow with a normal lunch and dinner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Umm... well, glad to see the mods changed the title from the ridiculous "The Soylent Alternative" on the blog.

Yes, fat is good, particularly if you want to lose weight, and I mostly agree with the people who say we should get most of our main calories from it, not carbs.

But pouring butter and oil into your coffee is crazy talk. Encouraging over- caffeination is hardly healthy, and this fat is devoid of other nutrients and vitamins.

Just slather butter on your broccoli, have bacon with eggs cooked in butter, eat the fat on your steak, eat nuts and avocados and cheese, and you'll have all the calories you need. If you're eating fat without the accompanying necessary protein or vitamins and other nutrients, then as they say, "you're doing it wrong".

</comment><comment><USER9> Kiiiinda misleading title. I too am a fan of bulletproof coffee, but don't see it as an alternative to soy lent which is a food replacement.

This would have been more interesting had you added nutrients and protein to your version of bp coffee.

<comment><USER10> I've read into Dave's stuff a bit, and it sounds like mostly bs to me, but I have heard good things about bulletproof coffee, though it's all been anecdotal.

Do you really feel better drinking it, or is it just a nice way to get quick, easy calories in the morning without any insulin spike from carbs?

<comment><USER9> I feel less of a caffeine crash from it, and a more even caffeine buzz. I'm not doing it for calories, as I already do 4HB or paleo breakfast WITH the bulletproof coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In what sense is Bulletproof Coffee remotely an alternative to soylent? I'm not even going to touch the major problems with Dave Asprey's claims, especially regarding mycotoxins.

But this seems like an extremely bait-y headline. There's no new content here - just a restating of Asprey's claims, plus the word "soylent".

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been on DIY soylent on and off since last June, and had a few weeks of bulletproof while I was doing high-protein low-carb soylent.

Bulletproof is nothing like a soylent replacement, it's just like a crazy energy drink. Basically you just skip breakfast and have your coffee whisked with unsalted butter and MCT oil. My experience is that it accentuates the alertness feeling of drinking a lot of coffee but without the wiredness. However, it tastes like ass - coffee with theanine has very similar effects and tastes much nicer.

Also worth noting that Dave Asprey talks a lot of hype - like many non- scientists trying to interpret the literature he tends to find one or two papers that confirm what he was hoping for, and ignores the counterevidence. Talk to your doctor before you start having a stick of butter every morning.

</comment><comment><USER12> Completely misleading title. This is at best a "breakfast hack" of sorts. It definitely is a cool concept and introduces interesting ideas, but it surely is not a food replacement or alternative to soylent.

</comment><comment><USER13> Or, you can make an actual simple Soylent alternative and do what I do:

\- 8 oz Silk unsweetened original coconut milk

\- 2 scoops (servings) of powdered Slimfast

\- 1 Nature's Way Alive! Women's Multivitamin

\- 8-10g (about 1 tbsp) of Potassium Gluconate*

Add protein at another meal and some omega-3 capsules and you're set. I hate to reduce my extensive research down to such a simple formula, but that's what I've done for a while now and it works great.

<comment><USER6> Another really easy alternative:

\- 60g uncooked dry soybeans

\- 60g uncooked brown rice

\- 7g oil or butter

\- Multivitamin

To make it, you soak the soy and rice in water for a few hours, and then boil them. Uncooked soy beans may be carcinogenic, so don't eat them raw. You can boil them into a mush, or for a shorter time, and it will change the consistency and flavor of the final product. The less time, the more planty it will be.

Next, drain the soybeans and rice (unless you boiled them into mush) and blend them together with the oil/butter, water (for however thick you want it) and salt (to taste). You can also add sweetener and vanilla extract or whatever flavoring you want.

Take the multivitamin (only once a day, obviously).

The above is in a single serving. I typically will do the boiling in advance and then blend on a per-serving basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Where's the protein? Sure you might loose some weight, but will it actually be fat your loosing or muscle tissue?

While fruit and fish oil are good for you, that amount of cream (4 tbsp all up) probably isn't the best. Cream/Butter is fine in moderation, but I don't think this much on a daily basis.</comment>


JP Morgan May Take Over Bank Of America - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jp-morgan-may-take-over-bank-of-america-2011-08-23

<comment><USER2> This scares me, because if the U.S. ends up in a situation where the entire country is relying on even fewer financial institutions than it is now, then the government will definitely consider them "too big to fail." Not that the situation isn't bad already, but I can only see this making it worse.

<comment><USER3> Do you think they'll try to do an AT&T and break them up into hundreds of little pieces?

<comment><USER4> Probably not in the current political climate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This will definitely not happen. There is no way it would win the support of BAC's shareholders and board.

</comment><comment><USER6> The deal must be off; BAC is up 11% today.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can someone explain why normal everyday chapter 11 bankruptcy is not applied to banks?

Why can't they wipe out the shareholders, sell off the assets, and pay the creditors from that?

<comment><USER8> The facile answer is that it's simple corruption. The slightly longer and more nuanced answer is that allowing such a failure to happen would cause more chaos and disruption than is politically acceptable to our elite decisionmakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One bank to rule them all?

<comment><AUTHOR> JPMorgan Chase Bank of America Merrill Lynch will rule _us_ all</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is HN's ranking algorithm implemented? - <AUTHOR>

There is an older article from a post about a year and a half ago titled "How Hacker News Ranking Algorithm Works" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013).  I understand how the algorithm works mathematically but how is it implemented on the server?  More specifically, how does the server keep its rankings updated if each stories rank decays as a function of the time since submission?  The ranks must be getting continuously calculated at some point, but I'm not sure when that would be--it doesn't make sense to calculate them on request, and there are way too many stories to be constantly processing all of them all the time.  My thought is that the rank is recalculated after each vote, and there must also be some rank threshold at which a story's rank is automatically processed and recalculated continuously in the background, this way the recent stories are constantly being processed while older ones past the threshold become stale and are ignored.  This could also be why there is no real pagination (instead the next url is /x/fnid=xxxxxxxxxx), possibly to discourage people from going too deep. I could also be completely wrong.  Can anyone shed some light on this? <comment><USER2> <http://arclanguage.com/install>

contains the source code less some of the secret bits and bytes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. I by no means have any experience reading lisp, not to mention there is a lot of code here to sort through (especially for someone not versed in lisp), but from what I can make out from a quick glance seems to confirm my initial guess. It looks like rank is calculated when an item is voted on. Also, it looks like a random front page story is reranked regularly to ensure no items get "stuck" at the top if voting stops (rerank-random). There's also a function (gen-topstories) to generate the rankings for the top 1000 stories, although I can't tell if this is being run regularly (it looks like it is just used to initialize the rankings). However, I could definitely be wrong.

I'm not able to determine how often the rerank-random function is called (looks like every 30ms maybe?) or how often the gen-topstories function is called (if it is even being called regularly or not).

Can you verify what I'm saying here is correct, or correct me if I'm wrong? Also, any insight would be much appreciated.

<comment><USER2> It has been a while since I looked - the one thing I wanted to fix was the expired link issue. It is rare that I can get past page 2 of the /newest listings before getting the Expired link notification, so, I probably miss quite a few submissions.

Basically, the link code that you see is a closure that contains the results for your particular view of the articles. In that snapshot in time, your list remains 'constant' until you refresh it with a few to /newest or / allowing pagination to work consistently as you move through the list. When you get the expired link notification, it means that your closure has been removed due to GC or a server restart.

Each time a story is voted on, the global pool is updated, but, until your closure is recreated, you would not see the effect of the vote. Therefore, the shuffling you would see when you or others upvote a story that might change pagination won't affect you.

I believe the top 1000 is separate from the normal operation of the site and is run 'at some interval'. I don't recall, but I don't think it is recalculated frequently.

Ranking is a function of vote velocity over time. A story that gets a rapid number of upvotes will get pushed up higher than one that has a lot of upvotes, but was submitted hours ago. i.e. 100 votes in the last 20 minutes will be pushed above 140 upvotes in the last 60 minutes.

I'm in the middle of some code, but, if I get a chance this weekend, I'll take a look. My lisp is rusty - haven't used it since the late 80s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just by observing, I think it goes like this:

        if linked_article.is_relevant_to_YC_company():
            goto front_page;
        elsif linked_article.is_negative_to_YC_company():
            linked_article.dead();</comment>


Show HN: Lost Ethereum - <AUTHOR> Hi guys,
I've written the first proof-of-mistake crypto token on top of Ethereum. You can see it at http://www.lostethereum.com/
It's basically a proof-of-burn substitute for users who mistakenly sent to the wrong address. It requires a web3 enabled browser, i.e chome with MetaMask, Parity, Mist, etc. This let's the web interface seamlessly interact with the Ethereum network.
Let me know what you guys think. <comment><USER2> From the pdf:

> _This balance is reduced by the edit distance between the string > representation of the two addresses. A one character difference yields 100%, > 2 characters is 50% and 3 characters is 33% of total amount._

I'd be more happy with an exponential reduction, something like 100%/50%/25%.

An error with 4 characters gets 0%? (I hope that an error with 19 characters gets 0%.)

> _The contract has a 1% inflation rate over found Ether to compensate the > author._

I think that "inflation" is the wrong term here. Probably "commission" or "discount", but English is not my first language. Inflation is when you get the discount every year / month / day.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reduction is capped at 33%. It doesn't redeem any amount past 3 mistakes. The reason being is that I didn't feel comfortable reducing the keyspace by more than that, although given the size of the keyspace I could have probably made it more lenient. Most of the errors people make I think are up to about 3 characters, based on a completely casual and informal survey.

It's inflationary in the sense that the total LOST tokens is the total amount of Ether + 1%.</comment></comment>


The Era Of Giant Chain Stores Is Over — And They've Ruined America - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/scale-implosion-2013-2

<comment><USER2> Anyone who has not seen his TED talk, should take a couple of moments and watch - for me, it finally distilled some of the discomfort I had always felt, growing up in the exurbs of Philadelphia:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html)

> ""The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our > civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the > common good. When you degrade the public realm, you will automatically > degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the > enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there."" — > James Howard Kunstler

>""I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.""

<comment><USER3> Thanks, that video was great. I,sometimes try to talk to friends and family about how our economy will contract after QE2 and other financial scams fail, and to hear Kunstler talk makes me more confident in my own thoughts on how society needs to become more local, less energy dependent. Good stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Essentially ...

"The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them."

and hackers are making that all happen!</comment>